#how to Tumblr

[ltleflrt]

Apparently it's time to start posting and reblogging How to Tumblr stuff again. Lots of people are hopping from Twitter to Bluesky. A big thing to emphasize is that "repost" is the term bsky uses for "retweet", and we need to educate on the difference between "repost" and "reblog" here on Tumblr. We have so many things saying "don't repost things!" and that might cause confusion now that bsky has entered the game. I'd hate to see people avoiding Tumblr because they got yelled at for something they didn't do, because lingo is different.

I'll start: on Tumblr, "reblog" is sharing the original post on your blog for your followers to see. "Repost" is creating a new post with something you saved or downloaded or screenshoted from someone else's blog, and that's highly discouraged here. Please reblog to share the original so the creator can get the interactions too.

[the960writers]

Welcome new followers who do not quite look like porn bots.

A word of advice: If you only hit the Like heart, your blog appears to be empty and your tumblr experience will not be good. Because people will block you.

I will block you.

Get reblogging, fill your blog. This is how it's done here.

[anexperimentallife]

You can tell who is new to Tumblr (especially refugees from other social media), because they're very concerned about the age of posts, worried about "spam liking/reblogging," use words like "unalive" unironically, and censor trigger words with asterisks. Some will also put irrelevant tags on their posts "for reach."

Dude, you are your own algorithm on this site. Stuff from 2012 occasionally gets a burst of 100K more notes. "Spam liking/reblogging" old posts will get you kissed on the mouth. With tongue. The only thing censoring letters in trigger words and using euphemisms will accomplish is to make blocking those terms useless for those trying to avoid that subject matter. Putting every irrelevant popular tag you can think of on your post "for reach" is just going to get you blocked for spam tagging.

Just relax. Follow people, reblog stuff that interests you, and make your own posts. You will find your people, and they will find you.

[princesoleil29]

❤️

[vaspider]

Since I just turned off reblogs on another post that quickly went from "let's have fun" to "this is fucking awful, I'm taking away this toy," please read this BlueSky thread from rahaeli, who I don't think is on here.

Most of it I've c/p for ease of readability bc BSky's threading sucks.

Okay, it's time again to talk about what the experience of having a social media account with a bunch of followers (*) is like. (* "a bunch" of followers is platform dependent. I'm getting irritating shit at 2k on Bluesky I didn't get until 10k on Twitter.)

(Ugh, wait, nevermind, I hit 3k while I wasn't looking. Anyway.) Someone who has never had more than 100 followers literally cannot comprehend the sheer volume of the responses you get. Even if individual posts don't get a ton of replies, if you post with any frequency, it accumulates.

Once you hit the first degradation threshold, your experience gets a little bit shittier. It's overwhelming volume, but the people who are following you are mostly ideologically, socially, and culturally aligned to you. You have the same concept of social media manners.

You'll get a few duplicate comments, because nobody reads the comments before they reply, but they're mostly from cool people, so you just roll your eyes a little at the same joke five times. You still make friends. You still have fun and can wind up finding neat new people.

And then those neat new people retweet your stuff, and it starts reaching out to an audience of people who are less aligned with what you think of as social media manners. You start getting some replies you find obnoxious: they're in good faith, you can tell, but they just grate on you sometimes.

And then *those* people start reposting your more viral threads, and you get people following you who are three degrees of separation from the people you are most likely to vibe with. And three degrees of separation is the second degradation threshold.

The second degradation threshold is where you start getting the constant, low-grade sand-in-a-pearl annoyances. The person who wants to argue with everything. The 15 people making the identical shitty "joke" that's actually just doing the exact thing you're complaining about, "ironically".

The people who look at a post that contains no question marks and think "there is an implied question here and I will answer it!" and leap to offer the most basic advice that you already thought of because you have existed for more than three seconds and can, in fact, think of the obvious answers.

The people who are spoiling for a fight no matter what, because you used one word in the post that is their particular berserk button and they're going to scream at you for hating waffles because you said you like pancakes even though you never mentioned waffles.

It is constant. It is never-ending. You cannot escape it. Every time you post anything at all, opening the app means wading through twenty garbage replies for every reply from someone who is actually cool and you'd vibe with just fine if you chatted with them.

You want to bitch about a minor annoyance? There will be 40 people all giving you the same useless advice. You want to squee about something you're enjoying that's making you happy? There will be 40 people coming to scold you because that thing isn't morally pure enough.

Every post. Every day. About 75% of the time you compose a post, you will get halfway through writing it and think "I can't deal with the replies this will get today" and delete it. You stop talking about things you enjoy, because you're tired of people shitting on them.

You stop complaining about the tiny annoyances in your life that you want to bitch about, because weirdly enough you already HAVE tried the first fifteen obvious suggestions you're going to get, and you don't want to spend an hour explaining why they won't work to everyone who's "helping".

(But you can't just ignore the "helpful" posts and not engage with them, because then you start getting accusations of being "elitist" and "standoffish" and jesus, lady, we're just trying to help here, why do you have to be so fucking rude and stuck-up, you full of yourself bitch.)

If you are any less gracious to the 40th person than that person thinks they deserve, there is a very good chance they're going to call you a cunt and drag allot their friends in to dogpile you and make the site unusable for at least three days.

The third degradation threshold is when you start needing to regularly call your local police department and politely remind them there are people who get very mad at you online and will try very hard to have you murdered by armed agents of the state and you'd appreciate it if they didn't do that.

I first had that conversation with my local police department in 2003. It's gotten faster now, at least? You usually don't have to start by explaining what social media even is.

Bluesky has tighter thresholds than Twitter did. On Twitter it was nicely exponential: the breakpoints were around 1k, 10k, 100k. Bluesky is running faster. I'm getting Twitter 10k annoyances at a Bluesky 3k. I am trying very, very hard not to switch over into Twitter 10k defensive posting.

I want to leave the defensive posting back on Twitter. I really do. I want to be able to bitch about a thing without having to wade through 20 "go try [extremely obvious thing]". I want to post about a thing I enjoy without 20 people yelling at me I'm bad for enjoyjng it.

There's a difference between arguing about an idea (which I love) and the onslaught of constantly infuriating replies plucking at your last goddamn nerve. And the more "last goddamn nerve" replies you get, the crankier you are, and then people lose their shit at you because you snapped at them.

So maybe let's all start keeping a few principles in mind: 1) if there's more than one reply, check to see if your point has already been covered. If it has, you don't need to repeat it.

2) Even the funniest joke gets old after the 20th time you hear it in 3 hours.

3) "I'm going to jokingly do the exact thing you just were complaining about because ha ha the real joke is I would never do that asshole thing" is never funny, and it is indistinguishable from you actually doing the asshole thing.

4) If there is no question mark in the tweet, think twice about offering "helpful" advice unless you and the poster know each other *mutually*, not just parasocially, you know it's likely to be new info for them, and you ask "do you want to hear how I handle this?" first and get an affirmative.

5) If you are going to ignore 4, ask yourself "is this a suggestion that someone with a reasonable level of generalized adult knowledge would think of trying within the first 15 minutes of approaching the problem?" If so, do not suggest it.

6) Do you really need to nitpick that grammar, spelling, or word choice? Did you understand what they were trying to say before autocorrect mangled it or they blanked on the exact word they wanted and found a close one? If you understood the meaning, don't be their volunteer copyeditor.

7) Is someone excited about a thing you hate? Are they having fun with the thing? Is the thing a front for white supremacist recruiting or organizing the overthrow of the US government? If the answers are yes, yes, and no, respectively, shut the fuck up and let people enjoy things.

8) We are all occasionally That Commenter. If someone you have a pre-existing relationship with replies to you and lets you know you're being That Commenter, it's because they have a positive enough impression of you they don't want to go straight to block. Treat this like the warning sign it is.

9) It deserves repeating: remember the Law of Large Numbers. Even if you only commented once, you may be the hundredth irritating comment that person got that day. Bluesky's terrible threading makes this worse: people don't keep a single thread of mounting crankiness the way they did on Twitter.

9a) If someone's top tweet sounds really annoyed at something, maybe check their timeline or follow back their nested self-QTs to see what level of irritable they're at and over what so you don't step straight on the same rakes they've been dodging all day.

10) However, remember that BSky also doesn't show replies made by people the OP has blocked in a thread. If they post about a pattern that's making them cranky and you look and don't see anything, they probably already blocked the worst of it. They still saw it in their mentions in order to block.

I really cannot overstate how absolutely exhausting and soul-destroying the experience of having a large account can be. It's also somehow still rewarding, or we wouldn't do it. But especially if you're a woman or a person of color or a female POC, that balance is really, really close most days.

And of course, the ones who stay are the ones who do find it still rewarding enough to keep doing it despite the constant irritations.

From here, the thread moves into a conversation about stuff specific to BlueSky, but the majority of the thread is truly applicable to Tumblr as well.

You may be the first person to comment "op lives on a planet without music," or "op has never heard of [thing OP didn't mention for whatever reason]," but you're probably not, and at a certain point, it becomes like someone tapping a sunburn.

So yeah.

[jiskblr]

Tumblr Rules for Redditors

Hello, fellow redditors! Many people are trying to tell you rules about how to Tumblr properly. Many of them are wrong, or assholes, or both. I am also an asshole but I’m going to not be one for a minute to give you some advice:

“Reblog this or you’re a bad person” and any variation on that is a violation of intergalactic law. Don’t do it. Also, refuse to comply if someone else does it.

Generally, people can see what you reblog, but cannot see what you ‘like’. A like may seem like an upvote, but it is much less significant than one, since it doesn’t affect visibility in the slightest. A like will be visible both to the OP of the thread, and to the person whose reblog you put the like on. Like promiscuously! It feels good to get likes and there’s no downside. (Unless you are a space alien AKA influencer.) There’s a setting for like visibility, but it’s still somewhat hard to find even if it’s turned on.

Tumblr nominally has the ability to browse global tags (e.g. seeing the entire site’s posts and reblogs tagged #superwholock or #reddit exodus) and to search the site for things. No one uses them and they don’t really work.

You are probably less surprised by this than denizens of literally any other website on the internet, but there’s mostly no algorithm here. Chronological order only. This now defaults to being on, but you can and should turn it off. (If you’re using the search or global tags, they might have an algorithm, but if they do, it doesn’t work. We don’t know because we don’t use them, because they mostly don’t work either.)

Anyone can have absolutely any conversation in the notes of your post that they like. This is how the website works. You are allowed to complain about it, but don’t expect anyone to humor you. I think it’s possible to make posts unrebloggable and disable replies, but this is essentially refusing to use Tumblr. If you want to do that... go ahead, I guess?

Many people have ‘DNI’ lists in their blog descriptions. This means ‘do not interact’ and indicates that they don’t want you to message them, reblog from them, reblog any posts they are OP of, or even, sometimes, ‘like’ their posts. It is good manners to respect these, if you know they exist, but in normal use you probably won’t look at blog descriptions very often so it is entirely okay to violate them by accident. (When the lists get very long, it becomes impractical to check whether you violate them. Generally, just skip it. You probably don’t want to interact with those people anyway.)

Notes on posts you start will go to you no matter how many intervening hops there are on the reblog chain. If you get a post with an enormous amount of notes, this can get overwhelming. Whatever the current incarnation of Xkit (basically RES for Tumblr except we’ve switched names and maintainers seven times) is, will have a setting to deal with this. If that’s insufficient, the suggested course of action is to reblog your OP to your own blog so that you have a copy for posterity’s sake, and then delete the OP. This silences the notes.

If you and another user both follow each other, you are ‘mutuals’. This makes it much easier to have conversations with each other, which is ordinarily sort of hard since everything is purely chronological. Frequently your mutuals are your friends; if not yet true, they may become your friends.

When you reblog things, you can write words both in the word part and in the tags, Modern tumblr norms are to write long rambling tags in full sentences rather than put words in the main body. Unlike some other norms, violating this one and putting your response in the body of the reblog is not particularly rude. The worst it does is make a reblog chain long. Probably don’t reblog things and just say “This.”, though.

Tags can be subjected to peer review, by which we mean someone copy-pastes your tags and/or screenshots them and adds them to the main body of their reblog. Generally this is a compliment. The alternative is to say “#prev tags”, and this makes everyone hate you because it’s hard to find which tags were ‘prev’. Please just peer review properly if they’re good.

If you want to search your blog, consider Siikr. Don’t overuse it, it’s one guy’s project.

Be verbose! This ain’t Twitter, no character limit. (Not even the really large character limit of a reddit comment.) Write a 3000-word story in a single reblog if you want, that sounds awesome. Use ‘read more’ if you do, though. Posts can be very long, one of our oldest memes is about this.

Infinite scroll is the default, but you can turn it off. Actually, check all the settings, many of them will improve your experience.

On queues: Go nuts. Some people put everything in the queue, some people almost nothing. Some queue specific aestheticposting (personally I do #too smol) and post other things normally. Most people who queue a lot add a queue-specific tag like #the mighty queue or #this queue shall pass, or at least I notice them more than poasters with untagged queues.

You know how Reddit lets you buy Gold and people go 'thanks for the gold kind stranger'? On tumblr we spend money on Tumblr Blaze, and it is considered the PvP section of Tumblr. Though sometimes people actually use it to spread posts they like, such as people attempting to evangelize Christianity (no, really, that happened a lot) or the, I hope, actually-kind stranger who blazed this OP. You can turn off PvP with one of the many settings.

Everybody be excellent to each other!

[jmtorres]

so a post wandered across my dash where someone had gotten a transphobic butthole commenting on their fic, and they were asking their followers go tell this person to kill themselves

and i said, have you considered telling people to kill themselves is an abusive tactic and maybe the proportionate response would be to delete the idiotic comment [alas blocking was not available as the coward hadn't logged in]

to their credit, this person blocked me rather than sending me abuse (though if they replied, I can't see it because they blocked, oh well)

but like. it kinda bothers me that someone i follow thought this was cool to reblog. i thought me and my mutuals were on the same page here. we don't tell people to kill themselves. we especially do not incite others to send someone a slew of such messages. we tell bigoted idiots off, block them when possible, report them if we can nail what they said to a hate speech or threat policy.

we do not tell people to kill themselves.

if you think it's acceptable to send someone a "kys" message for literally any reason please go ahead and block me, I don't want to know you.

[gutvodka]

hey guys first post 😳 i drew catboy dylric heh..

[freesia-writes]

Educational Saturday 😉❤️

I come to you today with a very important and very loving blurb about requests, courtesy, and how this site works.

This was a recent interaction I got, and I know others will be able to elaborate on it much better, so I'll keep it simple:

The single most important way to support writers is to REBLOG.

This site operates on REBLOGS.

Reading or requesting without doing anything to share the writer's work is very one-sided and not how we do things here.

SO, my beloved readers...

If you enjoy it, reblog it.

Don't bother with likes.

Comments can be put in the reblog.

.

sincerely, one of many authors putting their hearts and souls into creating awesome stuff for you to enjoy (and appreciate). ;)

[musashi]

it has come to my attention that people who are new to the platform in any regard are unaware that you can answer asks privately and don't know what tumblr oldies mean when we say "answer privately"

i ask for a lot of art permission as a youtuber and like to keep that correspondence private, and i am noticing an increasingly confused amount of people who try to then send me a DM on TOP of the ask, thinking thats what i mean. the confusion comes because i have DMs closed.

so! here is how you answer asks privately.

this only applies to non-anonymous asks, obviously.

hit 'answer,' like you normally would. type your response.

click this little arrow next to 'post now'

4. select 'answer privately'

click it. there you go!

when you do this, your response to the ask will be sent directly to the other person's askbox, and will show up as an ask notification for them. no one will see it besides you two.

this is common courtesy with non-anonymous asks. you generally want to assume that any logged in ask should be answered privately, unless it's something you or the asker intend to share with your followers like an ask game or a confessional or something the asker is trying to communicate to multiple people/boost.

a lot of tumblr users do not like DMs and have them turned off for a reason! for me, it is because the current culture surrounding instant messaging makes me uncomfortable and i do not want to feel "constantly available" to people. asks are nice because i can answer them when i have the time.

i didn't realize this had fallen out of favour or that people didn't know it was a thing, so here you go.

[porcupine-girl]

Hey Tumblr newbies! This is your periodic reminder to not look like a bot!

Recently I've had an uptick in bot followers after a long lull, but I have ALSO had an uptick in followers who, once I click on their blogs, appear to be real, but have the default userpic, no bio, and/or "Untitled" for the blog title, and so look like bots at first glance.

Please don't forget to change your userpic - it doesn't matter what you change it to, you can turn the default one upside-down, just so it's clear a human has interacted with it! While you're at it, change the title of the blog to be literally anything other than "Untitled" and for good measure toss up a few words in your bio; naming a couple fandoms you're in is a good one that immediately marks you as real.

But if you only do one of these, change your userpic for sure. Many people will just see a default userpic and block on sight without doing any further investigation. If you have a default userpic you have probably already been blocked by a few people you followed! Is it fair that Tumblr makes you follow people when you sign up before it lets you change your userpic, and doesn't warn you that the default userpic will make people think you're a bot? No. But that's life on the hellsite.

[sukurio]

Some older works bc I don’t really have anything recent rn. And I need to get this account jump started.

whirlwings belong to @lordmarble (check em out 🔫🥰)

[bokunoherokomikuko]

Fellow redditors who are new to Tumblr are welcome here, and while there aren't any moderated rules like in subreddits, there is a sort of social decorum that's pretty easy to pick up on.

Some tips if you're new though: - First of all: If you're new, for all the that is sensible in the world, change your icon, make a bio (doesn't have to be grand, but a little blurb is good), and/or make a post stating that you are not a bot, even if your blog is otherwise empty. This site is often plagued by spam bots, and blank blogs with default icons are often blocked out of self preservation by users.

- Second of all: Go add "X-kit Rewritten" (or "New X-kit") to your browser extensions.

- THIRDLY: You can follow tags and specific users to curate the content you want to see on your dash. Blocking doesn't stop you from seeing someone's content but you can add terms, tags, and names to your Blacklist (found in blog specific settings) and shield yourself a bit that way. If you have one of the extensions mentioned above, you can also block specific posts.

- Commit to the bit; If there's a joke, a bit, a playing going on, contribute (if you want to)! Makes it more fun.

- Nothing dies here. There are still posts from 2008 circling around and still making laughs. Don't worry about when a post was made, if you like it, reblog it!

- Reblog things!! No seriously, if you like something, the upvote system here is to reblog it so other people can see it. Likes are more like your private stash of posts you've liked or seen already (you can make likes and follows private in settings). Reblogs do not need a caption, if you've got nothing to say, don't. Lurk all you want, make your blog reblogs only, it's okay!

- Want to say something but don't want too much attention? Reblog and type in the tags area instead of the caption area. Doing this is more talking to yourself and maybe a few followers in spirit. If people like what you had to say, they'll add your tags to a post, just be aware. If you don't want that, a basic courtesy for yourself is to tag your post #do not reblog OR #Do not screenshot caption

- Tumblr tags can have spaces in them! They're separated by commas.

- You can make sideblogs! Got multiple interests but don't want them all in one big blog soup? Create a side blog to curate what you post and reblog. Make sure to use tags if you want that extra bit of organization.

This isn't everything, we'd be here all day if I listed it all, but it's a good few tips. This is a safe place for new peeps trying to get their feet wet. Please enjoy yourselves, be safe, and have fun.

[gilbirda]

Okay, I want to follow this content. What do I do?

Hello everyone.

So given the recent raise of "tag me!" replies in fics going around Tumblr, and given the recent awareness post about how disheartening, annoying and sometimes disappointing it can be to only get that kind of engagement — I've thought it was a good idea to explain what you can do if you want to follow content.

Basing on what Dis already added to the original post, this is a more detailed list of what options you have when enjoying the content you see.

I liked this prompt, I wish to see all the additions to it. How can I keep up?

You can subscribe to the post!

Desktop: Left click on the three dots and click on "Subscribe to conversation"

Mobile: Go to the Notes and click the top right bell icon

I liked this fic the author posted and I wish to know when they post the next part. How can I be notified?

You have several options here:

Find their Ao3! A lot of authors crosspost on tumblr and ao3, or prefer to post a more polished version on ao3 later on. Whichever the case, you can go to AO3 and subscribe to the fic/author there if you'd like

2. Follow the author! Really. We don't bite. You can just follow the blog, as easy as that. Want to be notified any time they post anything? You can subscribe to the blog and get a notification when they post anything

EDIT: THERE ARE "SECRET" DASHBOARDS, and one of them is a dashboard of all the blogs you have turned on notifications.

Blog Subscriptions Dashboard or go to Settings and turn on the tab in Settings -> Lab

A post about more fun Tumblr dashboards

3. You can still request to be tagged if they continue! But don't let that be the ONLY engagement you do. Like the post. Reblog it. Leave a comment saying what you like, a keysmash, a lovely "hey i really like where this is going!" and then you can say "if you do continue, can you tag me?". 9/10 we would love to write down your name. I can't speak for everybody so it depends on the person, but we want to not feel like we are screaming to the void. Engage. Respond.

KEEP IN MIND: Tumblr is a reblog-based social media. There is no algorithm. We get readers ONLY via reblogs. Likes? Likes are nice but do nothing. You liked the art? REBLOG THE ART.

Another post about reblogging, why it doesn't feel annoying for authors and how you can reblog and add tags faster on desktop and mobile

UPDATE: Tumblr feature for desktop!!!!! If you hover with the mouse over a post and hit "shift+R", post is automatically reblogged!

I liked this oneshot and I wish to know if they will continue it.

If it's a oneshot, RESPECT IT. The author may not have plans for the story, or doesn't have the energy to elaborate. Or if they do, it will be waaaaay later.

Whatever the case, don't demand a continuation.

Really, don't. Is very rude.

Still want to shoot your shot and see if they continue it?

Reblog it! Say why you liked it! In the tags, in the same reblog, wherever! If the author gets inspired they will continue, but remember we do this for free in our free time, you don't know what their life looks like. Respect that.

PLEASE NOTE: You can still find them in AO3 and subscribe to the fic/author there.

I like the AU/Idea/Project, how can I follow any new content for it?

You can follow a tag!

A lot of authors have a specific tag for their AU/idea/project (eg. "plant princess au") that you can follow if you want to keep up. Just check the tags in the post and hit follow.

Desktop:

Mobile:

And that's it! If I have more ideas or examples I will add to the post.

Remember, the point is not to make fun or to make people apologize for the "tag me" replies. This is informative for newcomers and older users alike.

If you have any questions or worries don't hesitate to ask! 🙂👍💖

[savebylou]

Give credit to gif makers on tumblr.

If you ever need to use a gif that is on tumblr this post explains really well how to use a gif from the creator, following this will help to:

Give credit to the gif maker.

Notify the give maker that you use their gif.

Puts a link to their original post.

Making gifs takes a lot of time to do, it can take even hours just to inmortalize a few seconds of a moment. Please have that consideraction and give the credit that they deserved, don't download them and post it as your own. Also if you think you have seen that gif before from a gif maker don't reblog the reposter.

If you still have doubts after reading the tutorial send me an ask and I will explain and solve any question. You can also do this the same steps of the tutorial from your phone, if you need me to explain it how let me know. Please boost this.